An English Word List


The link below references an alphabetized list of English words produced from a number of texts available free on the net. Since the sources were ASCII, the result is ASCII. The programs used to produce this were all standard Unix tools, including ex, sed, awk, and sort.

The word list itself contains 69,903 words, and takes up 665,681 bytes (that's about two-thirds of a megabyte). There are also 69,903 lines in the file, since each word is on a line by itself. I.e, the file (which is called wordlist ) is big and long, and so are most of the words in it. This in turn means that many if not most of the words are rare, obsolete, or simply weird. Furthermore, the entire file is in lower case, including all the proper names. However, you can look up the strange words at 1911 version of Roget's Thesaurus,

I made this list from these sources as an exercise in applying Unix tools, and as something to give my students something to play with. That's all it is. It may be useful to you, which is why I put it here. Or it may not.
No warrantees, implied or expressed.

You can do whatever you like with it; it's your language, after all.   For instance, if you were using Unix (or Linux), and you were curious about the English words that ended in -ically, or the ones that started with antid-, then the egrep (or grep) commands

would present them to you instantly in the gnu file viewer less
(or if you preferred, in the Unix standard viewer more, instead of less).

To save this list on your disk, go to the "File" menu of your Web browser after it's done downloading and you've looked at it all you want, and choose Save As. Then you can move the file wordlist to wherever you'd like.


Download wordlist


Last change 3/8/99
John Lawler